Wednesday, June 29, 2016

Last night marked the 8th anniversary of the Genre Reading
Group! Here's to many more years of good reading and great conversation!

We met for one of our biannual
salon discussions where there is no assigned topic. What a reading free for all! Our next meeting
will be earlier in July than normal, on Tuesday, July 19th and the topic up for
discussion will be music.

A few housekeeping items first:

The Library will be closed Saturday-Monday, July 2-4 in
observance of Independence Day.

Some exciting programs are coming up in July and August as
our Adult Summer Reading program winds down!
The French Film Series continues on Wednesday July 13 and Wednesday
August 17, both at 6:30pm. Call the
Reference Desk at 205-445-1121 for film titles and information. We’re honored to once again host the
Birmingham Arts Journal issue release reception and reading on Thursday, July
28th at 6:30pm. Drop by on Saturday, July 30th at 2pm to learn about using
solar energy in your home. The Adult
Summer Reading Finale is on Tuesday, August 2nd at 6:30pm and it will be fan
favorite, Bad Art Night. Enjoy dinner
and explore your worst creative ideas!
We can hardly wait to award our summer reading Grand Prizes!

The Library and surround lots will be closed on Wednesday,
August 3rd for HVAC installation. (Dates may change depending on the weather). Follow us on Facebook that week (and all the time!) for updates
on closures and access.

In the small village of Edgecombe St. Mary in the English
countryside lives Major Ernest Pettigrew (retired), the unlikely hero of Helen
Simonson’s wondrous debut. Wry, courtly, opinionated, and completely endearing,
the Major leads a quiet life valuing the proper things that Englishmen have
lived by for generations: honor, duty, decorum, and a properly brewed cup of tea.
But then his brother’s death sparks an unexpected friendship with Mrs. Jasmina
Ali, the Pakistani shopkeeper from the village. Drawn together by their shared
love of literature and the loss of their spouses, the Major and Mrs. Ali soon
find their friendship blossoming into something more. But village society
insists on embracing him as the quintessential local and regarding her as the
permanent foreigner. Can their relationship survive the risks one takes when
pursuing happiness in the face of culture and tradition?

East Sussex, 1914. It is the end of England’s brief
Edwardian summer, and everyone agrees that the weather has never been so
beautiful. Hugh Grange, down from his medical studies, is visiting his Aunt
Agatha, who lives with her husband in the small, idyllic coastal town of Rye.
Agatha’s husband works in the Foreign Office, and she is certain he will ensure
that the recent saber rattling over the Balkans won’t come to anything. And
Agatha has more immediate concerns; she has just risked her carefully built
reputation by pushing for the appointment of a woman to replace the Latin
master.

When Beatrice Nash arrives with one trunk and several large crates of books, it
is clear she is significantly more freethinking—and attractive—than anyone
believes a Latin teacher should be. For her part, mourning the death of her
beloved father, who has left her penniless, Beatrice simply wants to be left
alone to pursue her teaching and writing.

But just as Beatrice comes alive to the beauty of the Sussex landscape and the
colorful characters who populate Rye, the perfect summer is about to end. For
despite Agatha’s reassurances, the unimaginable is coming. Soon the limits of
progress, and the old ways, will be tested as this small Sussex town and its
inhabitants go to war.

Wanted: A bold adventurer who wants to travel the world
from a comfortable and safe spot behind a desk that has seen the likes of kings
and queens, paupers and princes. A humble book and rare manuscript shop seeks a
keenly intelligent investigator to assist us in our search for things thought
lost, and in our quest to return lost items to their rightful owners.

Never an adventurer, no one was more surprised than Delaney Nichols when she
packed her bags and moved halfway across the world to Edinburgh, Scotland to
start a job at The Cracked Spine, a bookshop located in the heart of the city.
Her new boss, Edwin MacAlister, has given her the opportunity of a lifetime,
albeit a cryptic one, and Delaney can’t wait to take her spot behind the desk.

The Cracked Spine is filled with everything a book lover
could want, each item as eclectic as the people who work there; the spirited
and lovable Rosie, who always has tiny dog Hector in tow; Hamlet, a
nineteen-year-old thespian with a colored past and bright future; and Edwin,
who is just as enigmatic and mysterious as Delaney expected. An extra bonus is
Tom the bartender from across the street, with his cobalt eyes, and a gentle
brogue―and it doesn’t hurt that he looks awfully good in a kilt.

But before she can settle into her new life, a precious
artifact goes missing, and Edwin’s sister is brutally murdered. Never did
Delaney think that searching for things lost could mean a killer, but if she’s
to keep her job, and protect her new friends, she’ll need to learn the truth
behind this Scottish tragedy.

Despite constant efforts to declutter your home, do papers
still accumulate like snowdrifts and clothes pile up like a tangled mess of
noodles?

Japanese cleaning consultant Marie Kondo takes tidying to a whole new level,
promising that if you properly simplify and organize your home once, you’ll
never have to do it again. Most methods advocate a room-by-room or
little-by-little approach, which doom you to pick away at your piles of stuff
forever. The KonMari Method, with its revolutionary category-by-category
system, leads to lasting results. In fact, none of Kondo’s clients have lapsed
(and she still has a three-month waiting list).

With detailed guidance for determining which items in your house “spark joy”
(and which don’t), this international bestseller featuring Tokyo’s newest
lifestyle phenomenon will help you clear your clutter and enjoy the unique
magic of a tidy home—and the calm, motivated mindset it can inspire.

Japanese decluttering guru Marie Kondo’s The
Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up has revolutionized homes—and
lives—across the world. Now, Kondo presents an illustrated guide to her
acclaimed KonMari Method, with step-by-step folding illustrations for
everything from shirts to socks, plus drawings of perfectly organized
drawers and closets. She also provides advice on frequently asked
questions, such as whether to keep “necessary” items that may not
bring you joy. With guidance on specific categories including kitchen
tools, cleaning supplies, hobby goods, and digital photos, this
comprehensive companion is sure to spark joy in anyone who wants to
simplify their life.

Are you stressed out, overbooked, and underwhelmed by life?
Fed up with pleasing everyone else before you please yourself? It's time
to stop giving a f*ck.

This brilliant, hilarious, and practical parody of Marie Kondo's
bestseller The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up explains how to rid
yourself of unwanted obligations, shame, and guilt--and give your f*cks instead
to people and things that make you happy.

The easy-to-use, two-step NotSorry Method for mental decluttering will
help you unleash the power of not giving a f*ck about:

Family drama

Having a "bikini body"

Iceland

Co-workers' opinions, pets, and children

And other bullsh*t!

And it will free you to spend your time, energy, and money
on the things that really matter. So what are you waiting for? Stop giving a
f*ck and start living your best life today!

Enter the "completely captivating" (Jimmy Ryan,
Spoiler TV) world of Mr. Robot. Cyber-security engineer by day and vigilante hacker
by night, Elliot finds himself at a crossroads when
the mysterious leader of an underground
hacker group recruits him to destroy the firm he is paid to protect. Compelled
by his personal beliefs, Elliot struggles to resist the chance to take down the
multinational CEOs he believes are running (and ruining) the world. Now, watch
all 10 Season One episodes back-to-back and uninterrupted of the psychological
thriller that critics rave is "damn near perfect" (Jessica Rawden,
Cinemablend).

From the creator of "Weeds" comes a heartbreaking
and hilarious new series set in a women's prison. Based on Piper Kerman's acclaimed memoir, "Orange Is the New Black" follows engaged Brooklynite
Piper Chapman, whose wild past comes back to haunt her and results in her
arrest and detention in a federal penitentiary. To pay her debt to society,
Piper trades her comfortable New York life for an orange prison jumpsuit and
finds unexpected conflict and camaraderie amidst an eccentric group of inmates.

Sarah is a streetwise outsider, currently on the run from a
bad relationship and painfully separated from her own daughter. When an eerily
lookalike stranger commits a shocking suicide right in front of her, Sarah sees
a potential solution to all her problems by assuming the dead woman’s identity
and clearing out her bank account. But instead, she stumbles headlong into a
kaleidoscopic thriller mystery, and soon uncovers an earth-shattering secret:
she is a clone. As Sarah searches for answers, she soon learns there are more
like her out there, genetically identical individuals, nurtured in wildly
different circumstances. And someone is trying to kill them off, one by one.

Masters of Sex stars Golden Globe® and BAFTA Award nominee
Michael Sheen and acclaimed actress Lizzy Caplan, who portray the real-life
pioneers of the science of human sexuality, Dr. William Masters and VirginiaJohnson. The series chronicles the unusual lives, romance and pop culture
trajectory of Masters and Johnson and the effect their research had on the
family and colleagues around them. Their study ignited a sexual revolution and
took them from a Midwestern teaching hospital in St. Louis to the cover of Time
magazine.

Alex Garland, writer of 28 Days Later and Sunshine, makes
his directorial debut with the stylish and cerebral thriller, EX MACHINA. Caleb
Smith (Domhnall Gleeson), a programmer at an internet-search giant, wins a
competition to spend a week at the private mountain estate of the company's
brilliant and reclusive CEO, Nathan Bateman (Oscar Isaac). Upon his arrival,
Caleb learns that Nathan has chosen him to be the human component in a Turing
Test--charging him with evaluating the capabilities, and ultimately the
consciousness, of Nathan's latest experiment in artificial intelligence. That
experiment is Ava (Alicia Vikander), a breathtaking A.I. whose emotional
intelligence proves more sophisticated--and more deceptive--than the two men
could have imagined.

Two computer programmers create the first-ever piece of
self-aware artificial intelligence, but things go terribly wrong when the
British Government steals their breakthrough and teaches it to become a robotic
weapon.

June 8, 1954. Several English nationals have defected to the
USSR, while a witch hunt for homosexuals rages across Britain. In these
circumstances, no one is surprised when a mathematician by the name of Alan Turing is found dead in his home in the sleepy suburb of Wilmslow. It is widely
assumed that he has committed suicide, unable to cope with the humiliation of a
criminal conviction for gross indecency. But a young detective constable,
Leonard Corell, who once dreamed of a career in higher mathematics, suspects
greater forces are involved.

In the face of opposition from his superiors, he begins to assemble the pieces
of a puzzle that lead him to one of the most closely guarded secrets of the
war: the Bletchley Park operation to crack the Nazis’ Enigma encryption code.
Stumbling across evidence of Turing’s genius, and sensing an escape from a
narrow life, Corell begins to dig deeper. But in the paranoid, febrile
atmosphere of the Cold War, loose cannons cannot be tolerated and Corell soon
realizes he has much to learn about the dangers of forbidden knowledge. He is also about to be rocked by two startling developments in his own life,
one of which will find him targeted as a threat to national security.

In The Canterbury Tales Chaucer created one of the
great touchstones of English literature, a masterly collection of chivalric
romances, moral allegories and low farce. A story-telling competition between a
group of pilgrims from all walks of life is the occasion for a series of tales
that range from the Knight’s account of courtly love and the ebullient Wife of
Bath’s Arthurian legend, to the ribald anecdotes of the Miller and the Cook.
Rich and diverse, The Canterbury Tales offer us an unrivaled glimpse
into the life and mind of medieval England.

On July 8, 1879, Captain George Washington De Long and his
team of thirty-two men set sail from San Francisco on the USS Jeanette.

Heading deep into uncharted Arctic waters, they carried the aspirations of a
young country burning to be the first nation to reach the North Pole. Two years
into the harrowing voyage, the Jeannette's hull was breached by an
impassable stretch of pack ice, forcing the crew to abandon ship amid torrents
of rushing of water. Hours later, the ship had sunk below the surface,
marooning the men a thousand miles north of Siberia, where they faced a
terrifying march with minimal supplies across the endless ice pack.

Enduring everything from snow blindness and polar bears to ferocious storms and
labyrinths of ice, the crew battled madness and starvation as they struggled
desperately to survive. With thrilling twists and turns, In The Kingdom of
Ice is a spellbinding tale of heroism and determination in the most brutal
place on Earth.

Join in the adventures of the quirky Yamada family -- from
the hilarious to the touching -- brilliantly presented in a unique, visually
striking comic strip style. Takashi Yamada and his wacky wife Matsuko, who has
no talent for housework, navigate their way through the ups and downs of work,
marriage, and family life with a sharp-tongued grandmother who lives with them,
a teenage son who wishes he had cooler parents, and a pesty daughter whose loud
voice is unusual for someone so small. Even the family dog has issues!
Experience the little victories in life with MY NEIGHBORS THE YAMADAS --
featuring the voice talents of comedic stars Jim Belushi and Molly Shannon.

With Happy People: A Year in the Taiga, Werner Herzog takes
viewers on yet another unforgettable journey into remote and extreme natural
landscapes. The acclaimed filmmaker presents this visually stunning documentary
about the life of indigenous people living in the heart of the Siberian Taiga.
Deep in the wilderness, far away from civilization, 300 people inhabit the
small village of Bakhtia at the river Yenisei. There are only two ways to reach
this outpost: by helicopter or boat. There's no telephone, running water or
medical aid, The locals, whose daily routines have barely changed over the last
centuries, live according to their own values and cultural traditions. With
insightful commentary written and narrated by Herzog, Happy People: A Year in
the Taiga follows one of the Siberian trappers through all four seasons of the
year to tell the story of a culture virtually untouched by modernity.

When his orchestra disbands, Daigo Kobayashi moves back to
his hometown and takes a job preparing corpses for burial. Too embarrassed to
admit his new career to his family, Daigo keeps his profession a secret, until
he’s faced with the death of someone close to him. Academy Award Winner for
Best Foreign Film.

Two men, each handsome and unusually adept at his chosen
work, embodied an element of the great dynamic that characterized America’s
rush toward the twentieth century. The architect was Daniel Hudson Burnham, the
fair’s brilliant director of works and the builder of many of the country’s
most important structures, including the Flatiron Building in New York and
Union Station in Washington, D.C. The murderer was Henry H. Holmes, a young
doctor who, in a malign parody of the White City, built his “World’s Fair
Hotel” just west of the fairgrounds—a torture palace complete with dissection
table, gas chamber, and 3,000-degree crematorium.

Burnham overcame tremendous
obstacles and tragedies as he organized the talents of Frederick Law Olmsted,
Charles McKim, Louis Sullivan, and others to transform swampy Jackson Park into
the White City, while Holmes used the attraction of the great fair and his own
satanic charms to lure scores of young women to their deaths. What makes the
story all the more chilling is that Holmes really lived, walking the grounds of
that dream city by the lake.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Oscar-nominatee Kate Winslet light up
the screen as Jack and Rose the young lovers who find one another on the maiden
voyage of the "unsinkable" R.M.S. Titanic. But when the doomed luxury
liner collides with an iceberg in the frigid North Atlantic their passionate
love affair becomes a thrilling race for survival. From acclaimed filmmaker
James Cameron comes a tale of forbidden love and courage in the face of
disaster that triumphs as a true cinematic masterpiece.

The Artist’s Way is the seminal book on the subject of
creativity. An international bestseller, millions of readers have found it to
be an invaluable guide to living the artist’s life. Still as vital today—or
perhaps even more so—than it was when it was first published, it
is a powerfully provocative and inspiring work.

Thursday, June 2, 2016

Welcome to the Genre Reading Group recap! Our next meeting will be on Tuesday, June 28th
at 6:30pm and it will be one of our biannual Salon Discussions. There is
no assigned topic so participants may bring/read/watch/listen to anything
they’d like!

Some of our big Adult Summer Reading programs coming up
include an all-ages self defense class for women on Saturday, June 4th at 2pm,
the next movie in the French Film Series, Band of Outsiders, on Wednesday, June
15th at 6:30pm, and Literary Trivia Night on Thursday, June 16th at 6:30pm (For
adults ages 18+ only, call 205-445-1121 to register your team of 1-4 people).

Riley Cavanaugh is many things: Punk rock. Snarky.
Rebellious. And gender fluid. Some days Riley identifies as a boy, and others
as a girl. But Riley isn't exactly out yet. And between starting a new school
and having a congressman father running for reelection in über-conservative
Orange County, the pressure—media and otherwise—is building up in Riley's life.

On the advice of a therapist, Riley starts an anonymous blog
to vent those pent-up feelings and tell the truth of what it's really like
to be a gender fluid teenager. But just as Riley's starting to settle in at
school—even developing feelings for a mysterious outcast—the blog goes viral,
and an unnamed commenter discovers Riley's real identity, threatening exposure.
And Riley must make a choice: walk away from what the blog has created—a
lifeline, new friends, a cause to believe in—or stand up, come out, and risk
everything. From debut author Jeff
Garvin comes a powerful and uplifting portrait of a modern teen struggling with
high school, relationships, and what it means to be a person.

For Titus and his friends, it started out like any ordinary
trip to the moon - a chance to party during spring break and play with some
stupid low-grav at the Ricochet Lounge. But that was before the crazy hacker
caused all their feeds to malfunction, sending them to the hospital to lie
around with nothing inside their heads for days. And it was before Titus met
Violet, a beautiful, brainy teenage girl who has decided to fight the feed and
its omnipresent ability to categorize human thoughts and desires. Following in
the footsteps of George Orwell, Anthony Burgess, and Kurt Vonnegut Jr., M. T.
Anderson has created a not-so-brave new world — and a smart, savage satire that
has captivated readers with its view of an imagined future that veers
unnervingly close to the here and now.

Marie van Goethem, a fourteen-year-old ballet dancer in the
Paris Opéra, has led a life of hardship and poverty. For her, dancing is the
only joy to counter the pain inflicted by hunger, her mother's drinking, and
her selfish older sister. When famed artist Edgar Degas demands Marie's
presence in his studio, it appears that her life will be transformed: He will
pay her to pose for a new sculpture, and he promises to make her a star. But
will being Degas's model really bring Marie all she hopes for?

It is 1704 when Genevieve Gaillain and her sister board a
French ship headed for the Louisiana colony as mail-order brides. Both have
promised to marry one of the rough-and-tumble Canadian men in this New World in
order to escape religious persecution in the Old World. Genevieve knows life
won't be easy, but at least here she can establish a home and family without
fear of beheading. But when she falls in love with Tristan Lanier, an
expatriate cartographer whose courageous stand for fair treatment of native
peoples has made him decidedly unpopular in the young colony, Genevieve
realizes that even in this land of liberty one is not guaranteed peace. And a
secret she harbors could mean the undoing of the colony itself. Gulf Coast
native Beth White brings vividly to life the hot, sultry south in this
luscious, layered story of the lengths we must go to in order to be true to ourselves,
our faith, and our deepest loves.

Before. Miles “Pudge” Halter is done with his safe life at
home. His whole life has been one big non-event, and his obsession with famous
last words has only made him crave “the Great Perhaps” even more (Francois
Rabelais, poet). He heads off to the sometimes crazy and anything-but-boring
world of Culver Creek Boarding School, and his life becomes the opposite of
safe. Because down the hall is Alaska Young. The gorgeous, clever, funny, sexy,
self-destructive, screwed up, and utterly fascinating Alaska Young. She is an
event unto herself. She pulls Pudge into her world, launches him into the Great
Perhaps, and steals his heart.

Out of a rare American tradition, sweet as hay, grounded in
the gentle austerities of the Book of Shaker, and in the Universal countryman's
acceptance of birth, death, and the hard work of wresting a life from the land
comes this haunting novel of a Vermont farm boyhood. In the daily round of his thirteenth year, as
the seasons turn and the farm is tended, the boy -- whose time is the
only-yesterday of Calvin Coolidge, whose people are the Plain People living
without "frills" in the Shaker Way -- becomes a man.

That is all, and it is everything. The boy is mauled by Apron, the neighbor's
ailing cow whom he helps, alone, to give birth. The grateful farmer brings him
a gift -- a newborn pig. His father at first demurs ("We thank you,
Brother Tanner," said Papa, "but it's not the Shaker Way to take
frills for being neighborly. All that Robert done was what any farmer would do
for another") but is persuaded. Rob keeps the pig, names her, and gives
her his devotion ... He wrestles with grammar in the schoolhouse. He hears
rumors of sin. He is taken -- at last -- to the Rutland Fair. He broadens his
heart to make room even for Baptists. And when his father, who can neither read
nor cipher, whose hands are bloodied by his trade, whose wisdom and mastery of
country things are bred in the bone, entrusts Rob with his final secret, the
boy makes the sacrifice that completes his passage into manhood. All is told with quiet humor and simplicity.
Here are lives lived by earthy reason -- in a novel that, like a hoedown
country fiddler's tune, rings at the same time with both poignancy and cheer.

Seconds before the Earth is demolished to make way for a
galactic freeway, Arthur Dent is plucked off the planet by his friend Ford
Prefect, a researcher for the revised edition of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy who, for the last fifteen years, has been posing as an out-of-work
actor.
Together this dynamic pair begin a journey through space aided by quotes from
The Hitchhiker's Guide ("A towel is about the most massively useful thing
an interstellar hitchhiker can have") and a galaxy-full of fellow
travelers: Zaphod Beeblebrox--the two-headed, three-armed ex-hippie and totally
out-to-lunch president of the galaxy; Trillian, Zaphod's girlfriend (formally
Tricia McMillan), whom Arthur tried to pick up at a cocktail party once upon a
time zone; Marvin, a paranoid, brilliant, and chronically depressed robot; Veet
Voojagig, a former graduate student who is obsessed with the disappearance of
all the ballpoint pens he bought over the years. Where are these pens?
Why are we born? Why do we die? Why do we spend so much time between wearing
digital watches? For all the answers stick your thumb to the stars. And don't
forget to bring a towel!

If your teacher has to die, August isn't a bad time of year
for it," begins Richard Peck's latest novel, a book full of his signature
wit and sass. Russell Culver is fifteen in 1904, and he's raring to leave his
tiny Indiana farm town for the endless sky of the Dakotas. To him, school has
been nothing but a chain holding him back from his dreams. Maybe now that his
teacher has passed on, they'll shut the school down entirely and leave him free
to roam.

No such luck. Russell has a particularly eventful season of
schooling ahead of him, led by a teacher he never could have predicted-perhaps
the only teacher equipped to control the likes of him: his sister Tansy.
Despite stolen supplies, a privy fire, and more than any classroom's share of
snakes, Tansy will manage to keep that school alive and maybe, just maybe, set
her brother on a new, wiser course.

GENERAL DISCUSSION: We
briefly discussed what separates a novella from a short story. The general consensus amongst several writing
resources I looked at is that a short story can vary anywhere from 1,000-20,000
words and in most markets a novella is 30,000-60,000 words.

Visit us today!

The Emmet O'Neal Library, in the heart of Mountain Brook, Alabama, is one of our community's gems. In today's fast-paced world, we offer an amazing variety of resources and programs for people of all ages. In our award-winning library, you can enjoy the newest books, study an art collection online, read of ancient civilizations, learn a new language, research the latest business trends, or travel to distant worlds of the imagination.